(no subject)
I'm jotting this down here because i'm sure my plurk and facebook are sick of hearing about this.
September 11th in Washington DC is high theater and the demagogues are out in full force, preaching apocalyptic dogma. The theme is constant: We must never forget our dead. And the 9/11 dead are lauded, dug up year after year to dance in a public display of social necrophilia that would put a Day of the Dead celebration to shame.
I've been trying to remember the dead for a long time too. Some of my earliest memories were of working on the NAMES project quilt (a constantly growing memorial to the victims of AIDS consisting of 3x4 cloth panels), building a panel for my dad. We had to fight tooth and nail to display it. It was started in San Francisco because funeral home directors would not handle the remains of AIDS victims. This was the only way to give them memorial. Today it is too big to ever display in one place but it has not been (allowed to be) displayed in its former place on the national mall for over a decade. It weighs 54 tons and is the largest piece of folk art in the world.
It does not get spots on CNN every year. They do not get fucking days of national remembrance. The people memorialized there tend to be different and other in some way. They get mocked when they're remembered at all.
Black.
Brown.
Junkie.
Fag.
But they died just the same, in numbers that dwarfed and continue to dwarf those of 9/11. If anyone wonders why i'm tense, combative or seem sensitive about certain issues, remember that. I was immersed in death from an early age and those deaths never got the justice that is their due. Some day, if I can close my hands around the right throats, they might.
Our own response as a nation to 9/11 has created many more forgotten victims. With depressing regularity we hear about the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latest in our long history of wars of colonialist aggression. The dead tend to be Iraqi and Afghan, some civilian, others "insurgent". I honor both, for while there are bad ways to go about doing it (IE in ways that harm innocents), there is nothing wrong with fighting back against an occupying power. The dead from these wars also dwarfs that of 9/11, yet both were fueled by rhetoric derived from that tragedy. This is not melodramatic socialist rhetoric. A look at any unbiased news source will show the statistical truth of my words.
Children who die of preventable diseases and malnutrition because capitofacists in our employ now run their country do not get national days of remembrance, yet there are millions of them every year. They get spots on late night infomercials run by charlatans, economic parasites who use them to line their pockets while destroying the economies of the nations they inhabit, thus ensuring there will be more of them to throw in to the pity economy. I'm looking at you, NGOs. But back on the main topic:
As a nation, we have pretty much handled the 9/11 deaths in possibly the worst ways possible. We have used them to justify killing civilians and occupying other countries, to curtail civil liberties, to justify spending literally billions on a giant target waving around in the sky to "memorialize" them (no word from the dead on whether they'd rather those billions go to make free hospitals or less crumbling schools). We have collectively forgotten that our own hawkish policies created the group that destroyed the towers*. We have supported a cottage industry of bigots who demonize entire cultures and religions, existing in an incestuous symbiosis with the men and women who do the actual disappearing and torturing of people from those religions and cultures. We have gotten less self reflective as a culture, more triumphalist and xenophobic.
We have basically screwed the pooch in every possible way. We have nothing to be proud of as a nation in that sense.
So put away your memorial t-shirt and pin. Go the fuck home. Read a fucking book. And think about the bodies who get no graves.
*Note: This rant is not an invitation to go off into conspiracy lala-land. There is a perfectly rational, well known explanation for these events, one that is already quite damning of our foreign policy. You do noone any good by making up crazy stories.
September 11th in Washington DC is high theater and the demagogues are out in full force, preaching apocalyptic dogma. The theme is constant: We must never forget our dead. And the 9/11 dead are lauded, dug up year after year to dance in a public display of social necrophilia that would put a Day of the Dead celebration to shame.
I've been trying to remember the dead for a long time too. Some of my earliest memories were of working on the NAMES project quilt (a constantly growing memorial to the victims of AIDS consisting of 3x4 cloth panels), building a panel for my dad. We had to fight tooth and nail to display it. It was started in San Francisco because funeral home directors would not handle the remains of AIDS victims. This was the only way to give them memorial. Today it is too big to ever display in one place but it has not been (allowed to be) displayed in its former place on the national mall for over a decade. It weighs 54 tons and is the largest piece of folk art in the world.
It does not get spots on CNN every year. They do not get fucking days of national remembrance. The people memorialized there tend to be different and other in some way. They get mocked when they're remembered at all.
Black.
Brown.
Junkie.
Fag.
But they died just the same, in numbers that dwarfed and continue to dwarf those of 9/11. If anyone wonders why i'm tense, combative or seem sensitive about certain issues, remember that. I was immersed in death from an early age and those deaths never got the justice that is their due. Some day, if I can close my hands around the right throats, they might.
Our own response as a nation to 9/11 has created many more forgotten victims. With depressing regularity we hear about the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latest in our long history of wars of colonialist aggression. The dead tend to be Iraqi and Afghan, some civilian, others "insurgent". I honor both, for while there are bad ways to go about doing it (IE in ways that harm innocents), there is nothing wrong with fighting back against an occupying power. The dead from these wars also dwarfs that of 9/11, yet both were fueled by rhetoric derived from that tragedy. This is not melodramatic socialist rhetoric. A look at any unbiased news source will show the statistical truth of my words.
Children who die of preventable diseases and malnutrition because capitofacists in our employ now run their country do not get national days of remembrance, yet there are millions of them every year. They get spots on late night infomercials run by charlatans, economic parasites who use them to line their pockets while destroying the economies of the nations they inhabit, thus ensuring there will be more of them to throw in to the pity economy. I'm looking at you, NGOs. But back on the main topic:
As a nation, we have pretty much handled the 9/11 deaths in possibly the worst ways possible. We have used them to justify killing civilians and occupying other countries, to curtail civil liberties, to justify spending literally billions on a giant target waving around in the sky to "memorialize" them (no word from the dead on whether they'd rather those billions go to make free hospitals or less crumbling schools). We have collectively forgotten that our own hawkish policies created the group that destroyed the towers*. We have supported a cottage industry of bigots who demonize entire cultures and religions, existing in an incestuous symbiosis with the men and women who do the actual disappearing and torturing of people from those religions and cultures. We have gotten less self reflective as a culture, more triumphalist and xenophobic.
We have basically screwed the pooch in every possible way. We have nothing to be proud of as a nation in that sense.
So put away your memorial t-shirt and pin. Go the fuck home. Read a fucking book. And think about the bodies who get no graves.
*Note: This rant is not an invitation to go off into conspiracy lala-land. There is a perfectly rational, well known explanation for these events, one that is already quite damning of our foreign policy. You do noone any good by making up crazy stories.